Field work on grasshoppers!PhD student Sonu Yadav has been busy this January-March collecting grasshoppers all over New South Wales for her landscape genomics project that will look at how generalist and specialist species differ in their adaptive capacities and response to environmental gradients. Field work has taken her up as far as Byron Bay to down in the Snowy Mountains

Phaulacridium vittatum; Photo: S Yadav

Trekking in the snowy mountains on the lookout for Koscioscula
grasshoppers with expert Dr Kate Umbers! Photo: K Umbers

Video animation of our review paperA great video animation was put together by BMC Zoology, which explains some of the issues and research that has been done on Darwin's finches and their parasites on the Galapagos Islands. The video summarises our review paper by Sonia Kleindorfer and Rachael Dudaniec (2016) published in BMC Zoology, which you can find here.

Field Trip to the Galapagos Islands 2016!In late January 2016 we (Rachael Dudaniec and Sonia Kleindorfer (Flinders University) went to the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador to continue our long-term study of Darwin's finches. We worked with colleagues from Harvard University and volunteers from the Charles Darwin Research Station - mist-netting Darwin's finches, monitoring nests and assessing impacts of the deadly nestling parasite, Philornis downsi, on Santa Cruz and Floreana Islands for 4 weeks. Check out the blog we had during our trip at galapagosfinch2016 on wordpress, where we shared our adventures!

The new lab is ready!Our new molecular lab is finished in E8C, ready for DNA extraction, genomic library preparations and PCR!